I have been chasing a nasty memory corruption bug on my MIPS box with
2.6.1 kernel. In the end it appears the following sequence has
happened:
1. userland gets a page and writes some stuff to it, which dirties
data cache. In my case, it is actually doing a sys_read() into
that page. See my kgdb trace attached in the end.
2. userland returns this page to kernel *without* any cache flushing,
i.e., the dcache is still dirty.
3. kernel calls kmalloc() to get a block from this page.
4. the dirty dcache is written back to physical memory some time later,
corrupting the kernel data.
It seems to me the problem is that we should do a cache flush
for all the pages returned to kernel during step 2.
I attached a hack which solves my problem but I am not sure if it is
most appropriate. It looks like the affected user region (start, end)
can span over multiple vma areas. If so, the fix will only flush the first
area.
Also, it is hard to find an appropriate place to do the flushing
The new 2.6 mm is a confusing maze to me. I hope someone more
knowledgable can come up with a more decent fix for this problem.
BTW, it appears in 2.4 we are doing this flushing in do_zap_page_range()
where we call a flush_cache_range(mm, start, end).
Jun
P.S., Here is the stack trace when dirty data is written to user page:
$8 = 0x2aac3000
(gdb) p/x kaddr
$9 = 0x811a3880
(gdb) bt
#0 both_aligned () at arch/mips/lib/memcpy.S:222
#1 0xffffffff8014351c in file_read_actor (desc=0x87fd1dd0, page=0x8102c178,
offset=0, size=2717) at mm/filemap.c:754
#2 0xffffffff80143088 in do_generic_mapping_read (mapping=0x803e3168,
ra=0x87fe8868, filp=0x87fe8820, ppos=0x87fe8840, desc=0x87fd1dd0,
actor=0x80143480 <file_read_actor>) at mm/filemap.c:658
#3 0xffffffff801437a0 in __generic_file_aio_read (iocb=0x80143480,
iov=0x811a3880, nr_segs=1, ppos=0x87fe8840) at fs.h:1334
#4 0xffffffff80143884 in generic_file_read (filp=0x61697265,
buf=0xcccccccd <Address 0xcccccccd out of bounds>, count=715927552,
ppos=0xa9d) at mm/filemap.c:877
#5 0xffffffff80162688 in vfs_read (file=0x87fe8820,
buf=0x2aac3000 "# /etc/inittab: init(8) configuration.\n# $Id: inittab,v
1.8 1998/05/10 10:37:50 miquels Exp $\n\n# The default
runlevel.\nid:3:initdefault:\n\n# Boot-time system configuration/initialization
script.\n# This"...,
count=4096, pos=0x87fe8840) at fs/read_write.c:213
#6 0xffffffff80162918 in sys_read (fd=715929728,
buf=0x2aac3000 "# /etc/inittab: init(8) configuration.\n# $Id: inittab,v
1.8 1998/05/10 10:37:50 miquels Exp $\n\n# The default
runlevel.\nid:3:initdefault:\n\n# Boot-time system configuration/initialization
script.\n# This"...,
count=4096) at fs/read_write.c:278
It appears I lost the stack trace when kernel finds data corruption. It is
somewhere
inside d_splice_alias() where inode->i_dentry, happens to be at 0x811a3880, has
a wrong value instead of the expected 0.